The committee asserted standing for tourism and recreational businesses, their customers, retailers, banks, and property owners.

The committee asserted standing for non profit organizations that sued "to reform the organizational failures that led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and resulting oil spill, to address the removal effort and to restore the environment."

"The private plaintiffs have a direct interest in ensuring that a spill like this never happens again, that this spill is properly remediated, that the environment, natural resources and claimants' private properties are as fully restored as possible, that information regarding the spill be provided to the relevant property owners and made public, and that all of these processes happen in a transparent manner, with an opportunity for full public participation," they wrote.

"In particular, plaintiff seeks an order enjoining defendants from discharging any further pollutants to the contiguous zone, ocean or exclusive economic zone and other waters of the United States," they wrote.

They asked for a complete list and amounts of oil and toxic pollutant releases.

They asked to sample the well for 10 years, at the expense of defendants.

They asked for copies of any reports defendants sent to regulators for five years.

BP moved in February to dismiss their complaint, claiming they ignored prerequisites to citizen suits.

"Plaintiffs proceed as if they are entitled to exercise the enforcement prerogatives of the United States," Don Haycraft of New Orleans wrote.

"They are not," he wrote.

He claimed penalties the plaintiffs proposed would run to $4,300 a barrel, and he objected to them bringing up money in a complaint for injunctive relief.

"To do so is to seek monetary relief through the back door or to improperly attempt to induce the court into making a factual finding that only the federal government is empowered to seek," he wrote.

He wrote that an underlying complaint of the Center for Biological Diversity sought such relief openly.

He quoted its original press release that it sought $19 billion in Clean Water Act penalties from BP.